MacOS support of fsbrain

[dfsp-spirit]

Problem: There are increasing numbers of technical problems being reported under Mac OS, and I do not have access to a Mac anymore since I changed labs.

The issues are all downstream rgl problems, where no figures are shown (e.g., #46, #37) or similar issues.

I feel that since OpenGL is not officially supported by Apple anymore, it is a matter of time when we will stop supporting MacOS. The problem is that rgl, the renderer used by fsbrain, is based on OpenGL. I am not aware of any alternative renderer we could use under MacOS. If people have ideas, please let me know. That being said, even though OpenGL has been deprecated, it should still work right now, but we will have to come up with an idea for the future.

I considered writing a renderer myself (or rather wrapping an existing C++ renderer into an R package), but given that I am currently leaving R behind for Python and Julia, this seems to be way too much work. For now, we will wait what the R community comes up with.

[dmurdoch]

I think OpenGL is unlikely to disappear on MacOS. It is in XQuartz, which is unsupported by Apple, but seems to be still alive as a contributed project. But if it does disappear, I think it's unlikely that WebGL will also go, and rgl supports that too.

[dfsp-spirit]

That's good news. And yes, XQuartz seems very active. I am closing this for now.